Free Tales from the Emergency Room by FAAAAI MD William E. Hermance

house tenants routinely fished (literally with fishing poles) items out of such locations. Had my jacket remained where I had left it, it would soon have disappeared Demerol and all. Another mistake I never repeated.
    We finally all arrived out on the street where I heard the ambulance attendant say to the patient who was still howling away as she was lifted into the ambulance, “You should close your mouth and cross your legs and if you had done that in the first place this never would have happened!”
    Penicillin Please?
    Late one evening just after I had begun my first rotation through the Emergency Room, two men literally burst through the door without stopping at the desk to register and hauled me off to the minor OR just across the hall. The next thing I knew I was backed up against the wall inside the room behind the large door. I was frightened at first and then, when bodily harm did not seem to be in the offing, indignant. It seems that these nicely dressed men in their thirties had just returned from an out-of-town convention where they both had contracted gonorrhea! And now they were on their way home to their wives. One of them explained to me that his wife would expect to have him busy in bed as soon as he got home. So, they needed penicillin. Well, there was no way they were going to get it from me! (In any case, it would not have worked instantaneously as they thought it would.) They were not happy and so I thought fast and told them the truth. I reminded them that if I treated them for a venereal disease I would, by law, have to report it and the Department of Health would then take steps to contact all of their sex partners who could be found. That was enough for them to hear and off they went, departing in the same manner that they had arrived. I was unharmed but a bit shaken. It was one of those encounters that I have always wanted to know the outcome of.
    The German Sailor
    In high school I became something of a German scholar. At least that’s what my teacher thought and so I crammed three years of study into two and went on to advanced German in college. But then my other study interests took precedence and between then and post graduate training I had little opportunity to use the language. Except once. There was an accident on board a German ship in New York harbor and an injured sailor who spoke little English arrived in the Emergency Room while I was on duty. I spoke greetings to him in German, much to everyone’s relief including his and I was actually able to remember enough to ease him through the emergency treatment and into the hospital. I knew he would have no trouble on the ward since there always seemed to be someone around who could help out with a foreign language. But I was happy to have been of help. The only other time I used my German was in the subway in Berlin, but that is another story.
    Cardiac Resuscitations
    There I was one evening during my residency covering the ER and the medical wards simultaneously. The emergency call “doctor, doctor” came over the PA system from the ER so that is where I headed at top speed. Indeed, the staff had already begun resuscitation procedures on a man in cardiac arrest. Things were proceeding normally when a second call came from a medical ward that a cardiac arrest had occurred there. I went as quickly as I could to that scene where a bit more intervention on my part was needed. I finally assigned a nurse to man the phone to the ER and continued with the staff which had assembled to treat the patient and to answer questions from the ER at the same time. It seems unreasonable now but at the time I had no sense at all of being stressed. This was work we had been trained to do and even having two arrests going on at the same time didn’t occur to me as unfair. Sadly, we eventually lost the man in the ER but the patient on the ward recovered. With cardiac arrests, even today that would not be a bad record.
    The Stabbing
    One evening when I was